Seeing My Dad Run The New York City Marathon Transformed The Way I Work Out

The whole “like father, like daughter” thing rings true in a lot of ways for me and my dad: We’re both ambitious, a little stubborn, and love a good non-fiction read. But one thing I didn’t inherit from my dad (besides math skills) is his athleticism—sports, races, and physical events are his thing. They are not mine.

I’ve cheered my dad on through many long cycling races, runs, and even a half-Ironman. While I could appreciate how hard he worked to achieve his athletic goals, there was no part of me that felt a desire to follow suit. But when he crossed the finish line of the New York City Marathon in 2014, something clicked.

On race day, I set my alarm for the start time and turned the marathon on TV. I was in Missouri for college and right in the middle of midterms—I knew I wouldn’t see him, but I wanted to feel like I was there. I’d set up the runner-tracking feature on the app so I could see where he was along the course—when he was crossing the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, running through Williamsburg, and completing the last stretch in Central Park. I texted my mom an annoying number of times (sorry, mom) and awaited anxiously for four hours and four minutes until he crossed the finish line.

This accomplishment of his made me more proud than I’d ever felt of anyone in my life. Running a marathon is a massive physical feat, and watching him do it made me think hard about how I was—or wasn’t—challenging my body. I was just getting into fitness at the time (begrudgingly), and was working out about four times a week. It suddenly occurred to me that even though I don’t have the competitive itch for an endurance event, I could copy my dad’s goal-oriented approach to make my workouts more meaningful and effective. After all, the training required to run a race isn’t necessarily that different from the training I do in the gym. I didn’t necessarily need to change what I was doing—I needed a competitor’s attitude.

Making that connection completely shifted the way I went after my gym workouts—and by focusing on progress, I’ve actually learned to enjoy them.

While my dad was logging training hours, I was logging gym hours—and sort of hating it.

I started working out consistently in the spring of 2014, and during the first six months, it was easily the least enjoyable part of my day. I was doing it because I felt like I needed to—in general, I wanted to be fitter, stronger, lose a few pounds, and have more energy. Exercise felt like a necessary evil from where I was standing. I was pretty detached from the entire process and I was just going through the motions, doing what I thought I should be doing.

While I was grinding away in the gym without a real purpose, my dad was pounding the pavement to train for the New York City Marathon. The race typically happens around early November and it was his “holy grail” of athletic events, if you will. He had run a marathon before, but this race was different—he’d been signed up for the New York City Marathon twice before, but illness and a crazy schedule got in the way both times. It was a dream of his that had been on hold for more than 10 years, and in 2014, he finally made it happen.

Inspired by my father, I realized that I needed to zero in on why I was working out and what I actually wanted to achieve.

Seeing my dad train so hard and diligently for an event he’d always dreamed of doing opened up a new way to look at fitness that I hadn’t really considered before.

Adopting his training-oriented approach, I started focusing on why I was really spending my time at the gym and focusing on each workout as a way to meet my goals and as a chance to do something good for my body. Training for a marathon requires physical and mental endurance and dedication, and creating a more positive mind-body connection was something my dad inspired me to work on.

I made a point to be more present during my workouts and noticed that I was feeling stronger during squats, and I could amp up the intensity during interval workouts. I recognized how great I felt all day after a workout, and how much energy I had. Seeing improvements kept me motivated to push through and commit to working out. Call it training for life.

My fitness routine had become a way to reach the different goals I had at different times (whether that was making it to the gym five times a week, doing five perfect push-ups, or just feeling great afterwards). Even though they weren’t as concrete as having a marathon to run at the end of a training program, these little measures of success kept me going. Now, whenever I find myself feeling meh about working out, I go back and think about how it’s a way to reach my goals, in the same way my dad trains for an event he’s excited about. And to go from someone who hated exercise to someone who writes about it at work is kind of an unexpected shift, right?

My dad isn’t running the marathon this year, but I’ll be there cheering on the people who are, knowing that they’ve worked insanely hard to achieve their goal—and I’m doing that in my own way, too.